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Thank you
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[laughter]
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I never really expected to find myself giving advice
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to people graduating from an establishment of higher education.
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I never graduated from any such establishment.
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I never even started at one.
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I escaped from school as soon as I could,
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when the prospect of 4 more years of enforced learning,
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before I could become the writer who I wanted to be, seemed stifling.
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I got out into the world, I wrote
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and I became a better writer the more I wrote.
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And I wrote some more
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and nobody ever seemed to mind
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that I was making it all up as I went along.
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They just read what I wrote and they paid me for it,
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or they didn't.
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[laughter]
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And often they commissioned me
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to write something else for them, which has left me
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with a healhty respect and fondness for higher education,
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that those of my friends and family who attended universities
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were cured of long ago.
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Looking back I've had a remarkable ride.
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I'm not sure I can call it a career,
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because a career implies that I had some kind of career plan,
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and I never did.
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The nearest thing I had was a list I made when I was about 15,
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of everything I wanted to do.
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I wanted to write an adult novel,
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a children's book,
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a comic, a movie,
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record an audiobook,
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write an episode of Dr. Who, and so on.
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I didn't have a career,
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I just did the next thing on the list.
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So I thought I'd tell you everything I wished I'd known starting out
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and a few things that looking back on it
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I suppose I did know.
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And I'll also give you the best piece of advice I'd ever got
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which I completely failed to follow.
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First of all,
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when you start out on a career in the arts,
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you have no idea what you're doing.
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This is great.
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People who know what they are doing know the rules
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and they know what is possible and what is impossible.
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You do not, and you should not.
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The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made
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by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible
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by going beyond them.
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And you can.
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If you don't know it's impossible,
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it's easier to do.
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And because nobody's done it before,
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they haven't made up rules
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to stop anyone doing that particular thing again.
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[applause]
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Secondly, if you have an idea of what you want to make,
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what you were put here to do,
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they just go and do that.
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And that's much harder than it's sounds
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and sometimes in the end so much easier than you might imagine.
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Because normally there are things you have to do
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before you can get to the place you want to be.
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I wanted to write comics and novels and stories and films,
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so I became a journalist,
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because journalists are allowed to ask questions
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and to simply go and find out how the world works.
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And, besides, to do those things I needed to write
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and to write well.
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And I was being paid to learn how to write
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economically, crisply, sometimes under adverse conditions
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and on deadline.
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Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear-cut.
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And sometimes it would be almost impossible
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to decide whether or not you're doing the correct thing,
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because you'll have to balance your goals and hopes
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with feeding yourself
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paying debts, finding work
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settling for what you can get.
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Something that worked for me
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was imagining where I wanted to be
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- which was an author, primarily of fiction,
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making good books, making good comics,
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making good drama
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and supporting myself through my words -
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imagining that was a mountain,
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a distant mountain, my goal.
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And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain
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I'd be alright.
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And when I truly was not sure what to do,
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I could stop and think about
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whether it was taking me towards or away from it
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- the mountain.
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I said no to editorial jobs on magazines
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- proper jobs that would have paid proper money -
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bcause I kew that, attractive though they were, for me
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they would have been walking away from the mountain.
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And if those job offers had come earlier
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I might have taken them,
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because they still would have been closer to the mountain
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than I was at that time.
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I learned to write by writing.
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I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure
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and to stop when it felt like work,
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which meant that life did not feel like work.
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Thirdly, when you start out you have to deal with the problems of failure.
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You need to be thick skinned,
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to learn that not every project will survive.
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A freelance life, a life in the arts,
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is sometimes like putting messages in bottles on a desert island
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and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles
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and open it and read it
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and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you
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- appreciation or a commission or money or love.
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And you have to accept that you may put out hundreds of things
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for every bottle that winds up coming back.
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The problems of failure, the problems of discouragement,
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of hopelessness, of hunger.
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You want everything to happen, and you want it now
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and things go wrong.
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My first book, a piece of journalism I'd done only for the money
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and which had already bought me an electric typewriter
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from the advance, should have been a best seller.
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It should have paid me a lot of money,
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if the publisher hadn't gone into involuntary liquidation
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between the first print run selling out
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and the second print run never happening
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and before any royalties could be paid.
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It would have done.
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And I shrugged
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and I still had my electric typewriter
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and enough money to pay the rent for a couple of months.
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And I decided that I'd do my best in the future
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not to write books just for the money.
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If you didn't get the money then you didn't have anything.
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And if I did work I was proud of, and I didn't get the money,
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at least I'd have the work.
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Every now and then
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I forget that rule
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and whenever I do, the universe kicks me hard
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and reminds me.
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I don't know that it's an issue for anybody but me
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but it's true that nothing I did
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where the only reason for doing it was the money
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was ever worth it,
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except as bitter experience.
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Usually I didn't wind up getting the money either.
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[laughter]
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The things I did because I was excited
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and wanted to see them exist in reality
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have never let me down, and I've never regretted
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the time I spent on any of them.
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The problems of faillure are hard.
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The problems of success can be harder,
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because nobody warns you about them.
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The first problem of any kind of even limited success
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is the unshakeable conviction that you're getting away with something
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and that any moment now they will discover you.
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[laughter]
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It's Imposter's Syndrome,
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something my wife Amanda christened "The Fraud Police".
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In my case I was convinced there would be a knock on the door
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and a man with a clipboard
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- I don't know why he had a clipboard
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but in my head he always had a clipboard -
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would be there to tell me it was all over
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and they caught up with me
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and now I would have to go and get a real job
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one that didn't consist of making things up and writing them down
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and reading books I wanted to read.
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And then I would go away quietly
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and get the kind of job
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I would have to get up early in the morning
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and wear a tie
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and not make things up anymore.
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The problems of success, they're real
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and with luck, you'll experience them.
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The point where you stop saying yes to everything
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because now the bottles you throw in the ocean are all coming back
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and you have to learn to say "no".
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I watched my peers and my friends and the ones who are older than me
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and I watched how miserable some of them were.
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I'd listen to them telling they couldn't envisage a world
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where they did what they've always wanted to do anymore,
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because now they had to earn a certain amount every month
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just to keep where they were.
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They couldn't go and do the things that mattered
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and that they had really wanted to do
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and that seemed as big a tragedy as any problem of failure.
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And after that, the biggest problem of success
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is that the world conspires
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to stop you doing the thing that you do
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because you're successful.
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There was a day when I looked up and realized
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that I had become someone
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who professionally replied to email
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and he wrote as a hobby.
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I started answering fewer emails
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and was relieved to find, I was writing much more.
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Forthly, I hope you'll make mistakes.
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If you make mistakes, it means you're out there doing something
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and the mistakes in themselves can be very useful.
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I once misspelled Caroline in a letter,
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transposing the A and the O,
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and I thought "Coraline
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looks almost like a real name".
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Remember, whatever discipline you're in,
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whether you're a musician of a photographer,
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a fine artist or a cartoonist,
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a writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer,
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whatever you do, you have one thing that's unique:
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you have the ability to make art.
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And for me, and for so many of the people I've known
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that's been a lifesaver.
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The ultimate lifesaver.
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It gets you though good times, and it gets you
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through the other ones.
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Sometimes life is hard, things go wrong
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in life, and in love, and in business and in friendship
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and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong.
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And when things get though, this is what you should do.
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Make good art.
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I'm serious.
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[laughter]
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Husband runs off with a politician?
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Make good art.
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[laughter]
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Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor?
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Make good art.
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IRS on your trail? Make good art.
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Cat exploded? Make good art.
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Someone on the internet thinks what you're doing
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is stupid or evil or it's all been done before?
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Make good art.
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Probably things will work out somehow,
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eventually time will take the sting away
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and that doesn't even matter.
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Do what only you can do best.
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Make good art.
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Make it on the bad days.
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Make it on the good days too.
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And fifthly, while you're at it,
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make your art.
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Do the stuff that only you can do.
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The urge, starting out, is to copy
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and that is not a bad thing.
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Most of us only find our own voices
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after we've sounded like a lot of other people.
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[laughter]
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But one thing that you have, that nobody else has
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is you, your voice, your mind, your story, your vision.
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So write and draw and build and play
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and dance and live as only you can.
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The moment that you feel that just possibly
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you're walking down the street naked
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exposing too much of your heart and your mind
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and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself,
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that's the moment you may be starting to get it right.
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The things I've done that work the best
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were the things I was the least certain about.
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The stories where I was sure they would either work
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or, more likely, be the kind of embarrassing failures
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that people would gather together and discuss until the end of time.
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They always had that in common: looking back at them
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people explain why they were inevitable successes
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and when I was doing them I had no idea.
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I still don't.
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And where would be the fun in making something
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you knew was going to work?
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And sometimes the things I did really didn't work.
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There are stories of mine that have never been reprinted.
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Some of them have never even left the house.
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But I learned as much from them as I did from the things that worked.
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Ok, sixthly, I'm gonna pass on some secret freelancer knowledge.
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Secret knowledge is always good and it's useful
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for anyone who ever plans to create art for other people,
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to enter a freelance world of any kind.
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I learned it in comics
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but it applies to other fields too, and it's this.
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People get hired because, somehow, they get hired.
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[laughter]
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In my case, I did something which these days would be easy to check
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and would get me into a lot of trouble
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and when I started out in those pre-internet days
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seemed like a sensible career strategy.
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When I was asked by editors who I'd written for,
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I lied.
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[laughter]
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I listed a handful of magazines that sounded likely
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and I sounded confident and I got jobs.
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[cheering]
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I then made it a point of honour to have written
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something for each of the magazines I'd listed
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to get that first job.
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So that I hadn't actually lied,
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I had just been chronologically challenged.
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[laughter]
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But you get work however you get work.
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But people keep working, in a freelance world
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- and more and more of today's world is freelance -
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because the work is good
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and because they're easy to get along with
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and because they deliver the work on time.
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And you don't even need all three.
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Two out of three is fine.
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[laughter]
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People will tolerate how unpleasant you are
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if your work is good and you deliver it on time.
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[laughter]
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People will forgive the lateness of your work
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if it's good and they like you.
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[laughter]
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And you don't have to be as good as everyone else
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if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you.
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[laughter]
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[applause]
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So when I agreed to give this address
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I thought what is the best piece of advice I was ever given
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and I realized that it was actually a piece of advice
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that I had failed to follow
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and it came from Stephen King.
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It was 20 years ago, at the height of the success
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- the initial success -
-
of Sandman, the comic I was writing.
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[applause] Oh thank you
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I was writing a comic people loved
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and they were taking it seriously
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and Stephen King liked Sandman
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and my novel with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens,
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and he saw the madness that was going on
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- the long signing lines, all of that stuff -
-
and his advice to me was this.
-
He said "this is really great
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you should enjoy it".
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And I didn't.
-
Best advice I ever got that I ignored.
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Instead, I worried about it.
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I worried about the next deadline,
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the next idea,
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the next story.
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There wasn't a moment for the next 14 or 15 years
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that I wasn't writing something in my head
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or wondering about it.
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And I didn't stop and look around and go:
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"this is really fun".
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I wish I'd enjoyed it more.
-
It's been an amazing ride,
-
but there were parts of the ride that I missed,
-
because I was too worried about things going wrong,
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about what came next, to enjoy the bit that I was on.
-
That was the hardest lesson for me, I think:
-
to let go, and enjoy the ride.
-
Because the ride takes you to some remarkable
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and unexpected places.
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And here, on this platform, today for me
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is one of those places
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and I am enjoying myself immensely.
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[applause]
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I'd actually put that in brackets.
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Just in case I wasn't, I wouldn't say it.
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[laughter]
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To all today's graduates:
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I wish you luck, luck is useful.
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Often you will discover that the harder you work
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and the more wisely that you work
-
the luckier you will get.
-
But there is luck, and it helps.
-
We're in a transitional world right now
-
if you're in any kind of artistic field,
-
because the nature of distribution is changing.
-
The models by which creators got their work out into the world
-
and got to keep a roof over their head
-
and buy sandwhiches while they did that
-
they're all changing.
-
I talked to people at the top of the food chain
-
in publishing and bookselling,
-
in music, in all those areas
-
and no one knows what the landscape will look like
-
two years from now, let alone a decade away.
-
The distribution channels that people have built
-
over the last century or so, are in flux
-
for print, for visual artists, for musicians,
-
for creative people of all kinds.
-
Which is on the one hand intimidating
-
and on the other, immensely liberating.
-
The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're-supposed-tos
-
of how you get your work seen and what you do then,
-
they're breaking down.
-
The gatekeepers are leaving their gates.
-
You can be as creative as you need to be, to get your work seen.
-
YouTube and the Web and whatever comes after YouTube and the Web
-
can give you more people watching
-
than all television ever did.
-
The old rules are crumbling
-
and nobody knows what the new rules are.
-
So make up your own rules.
-
Someone asked me recently how to do
-
something she thought was going to be difficult,
-
in this case recording an audiobook.
-
And I suggested she pretend that she was someone who could do it.
-
[laughter]
-
Not pretend to do it, but pretend she was someone who could.
-
She put up a notice to this effect on the studio wall
-
and she said it helped.
-
So be wise, because the world needs more wisdom
-
and if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise
-
and then just behave like they would.
-
[applause]
-
And now go, and make interesting mistakes,
-
make amazing mistakes,
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make glorious and fantastic mistakes.
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Break rules.
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Leave the world more interesting for your being here.
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Make good art.
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Thank you.
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[applause]